


On a Cloudy Day

by Lyrstzha



Category: Sunshine - McKinley
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coda, F/M, POV First Person, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 20:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrstzha/pseuds/Lyrstzha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After defeating Bo, Sunshine would like to rest and recuperate and get back to her simple life---even if that life isn't so simple anymore, even if it does have a vampire, magic, and a war against evil in it now.  But when is anything ever that easy for her nowadays?</p>
            </blockquote>





	On a Cloudy Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tracy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tracy/gifts).



It wasn't like being taken by vampires; I heard them coming. But the thing is, when vampires are after you, you know enough to run. Not that it ever does any good, of course, vampire speed being what it is, but at least it's a really simple equation for your instincts to solve: one human plus one vampire equals try to get the skegging hell out of there as fast as you can, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred blinks.

Getting nabbed by an SOF squad isn't like that at all—at least, not if you're a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, or trying to seem like one. When the goddess of pain's minions came to take me in "for further questioning" only a couple of days after Con and I defeated Bo, I really kind of _wanted_ to run for the hills, but I didn't.

Yeah, maybe that fetch the goddess had planted on me should have been more of a warning. Maybe I'd just had too many other things to worry about lately, what with worrying that I might die or become a bad cross psycho killer and getting caught up in vampire wars, and it just seemed silly to worry about how I was going to deal with SOF if I survived. Maybe I'm just shortsighted like that.

They were waiting for me as I came home from the coffeehouse, a little ways up the lane from the farthest out of Yolande's wards. That alone should probably have been a warning. They had parked slant-wise across the pavement, not leaving enough space for much to get by. Certainly I couldn't have slithered the Wreck past them easily. When I stopped they waved me out, casual as anything, and then there were these SOFs I'd never met before who were all Miss Seddon and could I please accompany them.

But I guess mostly people don't _tell_ you they want to lock you up and interrogate you beforehand. That would ruin the surprise, right? And I tried mentioning plaintively how tired I was, but they were politely insistent, and I figured I couldn't exactly say no without looking suspiciously uncooperative.

Next thing I knew, I was in the goddess' office again, trying to look as innocent and boring as possible. Move along please; there's nothing to see here. From the sharp look in her eyes, she wasn't buying it even a little bit this time. She was every bit as unnerving as the times we'd met before, and I still found it difficult to look straight at her.

"I have a few more questions about the incident you were involved in," the goddess of pain said. "The _latest_ incident, that is," she added pointedly.

"Oh." I blinked at her, trying for a bovine placidity in my face, but all the while desperately wishing Pat or Jesse or Theo would walk in. Where _were_ all the SOF guys I trusted? Didn't they know I was I here? "As I said before, I really don't know much about what happened. It was all very traumatic and confusing." That, thankfully for my meager acting abilities, was at least mostly true.

"Really," she said flatly.

"I'm sorry I can't be more help," I told her, with all the sincerity I could summon up.

"Then perhaps I can jog your memory." I didn't like the way she looked at me when she said that. It was like I had the sense that her eyes were deep, murky pools inside which something big and hungry circled, just waiting its chance to swallow me whole. "Maybe you can explain this to me," she said with deceptive mildness, opening a drawer of her desk and taking out what looked like a small, tightly closed metal box. A quick frisson of _wrongness_ skittered up my spine, and I could tell right away that I didn't want to know what was in that box in just about the same way I didn't want to know what my intestines actually look like.

That didn't stop the goddess from opening the box, of course, or from upending it so that the reddish brown contents fell to the smooth surface of her desk with a rather dramatic and nauseating _splat_.

I threw myself backwards in my uncomfortable chair, and the sharp shriek of alarm I let out wasn't feigned in the slightest. Ask anybody; I get the screaming whim-whams just from looking at rare hamburger bleeding on the grill at Charlie's. I twitched my head a little to one side, so that the Deputy Executive Jain nameplate on the desk blocked just a bit of the gruesome view, but it didn't really help all that much.

"_What_...?" I gasped out weakly, but I knew. Maybe I didn't know exactly what bit of innards it was, but once you've smelled it, there is _nothing_ like the scent of dead vampire. That reek is as unforgettable as it is kali goddamned horrible.

"I'd think you'd recognize a vampire's heart after your experience in No Town," the goddess said smoothly. "Even one that's a bit worse for wear."

"I wasn't really looking _closely_ that night," I said, which was also true. I had done my damnedest to see as little as possible of what I was doing when I jammed my fingers into their hearts. In books and vids that kind of thing might seem really thor, but take it from me, in real life it's mostly just revolting and terrifying.

"Really?" she said, but it didn't sound like a question at all. "Because forensics has had time to analyze the remains we recovered from Old Town, and they found something curious." Her eyes narrowed at me, but I didn't think she was trolling me. Not yet, anyway.

"Oh?" I said faintly, trying not to appear panicked. Neither Con nor I had given a second thought to forensics when we'd tackled Bo's lair; who thinks about stuff like that when facing certain death? And I doubted it was the kind of thing Con would ever think about at all anyway.

The goddess leaned forward a little, like a hunting dog on the point, watching me with avid, hungry eyes. "There are fingerprints burned into the center of this heart and several of the others we found," she said. "Forensics got a perfect cast of two fingers all the way up to the palm." There was an awful sort of _relish_ in her voice when she said this, too, that sounded like triumph to me.

I tried not to flinch, but I couldn't quite manage it. I opened my mouth to say something—_anything_—but what could I possibly say? "Ah," I settled on at last. "Oh." Hey, I never claimed to be a good actress.

"Don't think you can play me for a fool this time," she snapped sharply. "You know we have your fingerprints. And I want to know how you apparently walked right up to an entire gang of vampires and ripped their hearts out one at a time with _your bare hands_. Your scorching hot bare hands, I might add. I want the _truth_ this time, Miss Seddon."

I swallowed down the sick feeling rising in my gut. I was well and truly skegged this time, and I had the sinking sensation that my future had suddenly narrowed down to a lifetime of small white rooms in research labs. And I'd just been getting comfortable with the idea that I might _have_ a future, too. Damn.

"I'm afraid I really don't remember what happened," I told her, as apologetically as I could. "But what you're describing, that would be impossible, so there must be some other explanation." Yeah, it even sounded pretty pathetic in my own head, but what else could I possibly say? She had me red-handed, if you'll excuse the pun. Red-handed and red-eyed, if you want to be exact about it, in fact, because I couldn't imagine there was any way she wouldn't figure out what I already strongly suspected: there was Other blood somewhere in my veins. All I could do was hold out the faint hope that because it was _supposed_ to be impossible to kill a vampire that way, she wouldn't really believe that I had.

You'd think months of grinding horror and poison and shock would have cured me of any tendency towards desperate optimism, but apparently you'd be wrong. If I wasn't so terrified, I might have laughed at myself. Shiva _wept_.

"I see," the goddess said shortly. "Perhaps being in a quiet, safe environment will help release your memory. We can help you with that." She didn't even gesture, but one of her minions stepped immediately forward from standing ramrod straight beside the door to hovering uncomfortably close to me. "Show Miss Seddon to her room," the goddess of pain directed him.

"Hey, wait, no," I objected immediately. "I really need to be getting home. I have to be at work again in seven hours."

"Oh, I don't think so," the goddess said, with a slick, aggressive sort of pleasantness. "I'm sure you understand how important this development is to our war against the Others. We'll talk again after you've had time to...remember."

It was clearly a dismissal for the moment, and I had the distinct impression that if I didn't go along to my cell quietly, they'd slap a bind on me as soon as look at me.

"I need to at least call my family and let them know where I am," I tried.

"They've been informed through official channels," the goddess said shortly. "But perhaps you'd like to call the mysterious Mr. Connor instead. We can't seem to locate him." She watched me again for my reaction.

"I wouldn't know how to reach him," I said immediately. "I hardly know him." _No_, I wanted to growl at her. You aren't going to use me to get at Con, you nomad bitch.

There was a spark in her eyes that told me she thought she'd scented a vulnerability. "We'll have to keep looking, then," she said silkily.

As much as I wanted to struggle and scream, there didn't seem much for it but to go quietly. You know, it's funny, but when I'd been held captive and shackled for two days while waiting to die a horrible death, I'd actually felt less horrified. If you think about it, no matter how afraid you are of dying, you know that it can't go on forever. There's pain and fear, sure, but there's only going to be so much of it before it's all over. Being dry-guyed might suck, if you'll pardon the pun, but it's not a very lengthy experience. But a life spent locked up as a lab rat? _That_ might go on for decades—lots of them, maybe, given the magic in me.

My heart sank impossibly further when I saw the cell meant for me. It was a small, white room with a hard-looking bed in one corner, a table and two plastic chairs in the middle, and a toilet and sink in the other corner. But what really got me was the windowless walls. The goddess of pain _couldn't_ know about my affinity for sunlight, could she? Even if she had me figured for an unlicensed magic handler—and I really hoped that she hadn't, but I wasn't about to take bets on that one—according to everything I'd heard, affinities were always for the basic four elements, or maybe wood or metal in rarer cases. I didn't know anyone who'd ever heard of someone like me, someone who drew their power from sunlight. The goddess shouldn't have been able to leap to sunlight as my element.

Of course, I might just be going paranoid. I had to admit that it was entirely possible that all SOF cells were depressing windowless rooms just as a general design principle. And I felt pretty sure that the hollow _thud_ the door made as it closed and bolted was specifically calibrated to sound as final and grim as possible.

With not much else to do, I curled myself up in a tight huddle on the bed, trying not to shiver with something that wasn't really cold. I wasn't going to call on Con for help. I _wasn't_. He'd said he'd have to come if I called, and I was afraid he really would, even here. Bad enough she had me; I wouldn't betray Con into the goddess' hands.

I had a brief, desperate thought of trying to escape. After all, I'd gotten away from vampires, hadn't I? But they'd had no clue what I really was, and they'd treated me like a normal human woman. Deep in the bowels of SOF regional HQ, surrounded by wards and spells, I figured I'd have to be crazy to try to use my magic to get myself out. Surely they'd drop me before I got ten feet down the corridor.

Yeah, I'd have to crazy to try that. I wondered how long it would take in this sunless little room before I was.

*********

"Sunshine," a soft tinny voice whispered from a small speaker set into the ceiling at what I thought was probably sometime just before dawn. I jumped and stared at it. "Act casual," the voice hissed. "We hijacked control of the sound, but she's _watching_."

I immediately tried to shift my partial turn into rolling over on the bed, punching the cement-like mattress with one hand for verisimilitude. "Pat?" I mumbled behind my hand, pretending to yawn.

"Yeah," Pat said. "Gods, I'm sorry, Sunshine. We had no idea what the goddess was up to until Jesse and I heard you were locked up down here."

I curled my arms up over my head, as if I were trying to block out the garish artificial lights that had been glaring down on me all night. "Can you help me?" I asked from behind that concealment.

"I promise you we're doing everything we can," Pat swore. "We'll think of something."

It was a great relief to hear a friendly voice, of course. But all in all, it wasn't as heartening as it could have been. I guess I'd really been hoping Pat would say, "Don't worry, Sunshine, we'll have you out of there in a flash. You'll be home in time to bake muffins for the afternoon crowd." That would have been a lot more comforting than, "We'll think of something."

"What do I do?" I said, more because I didn't want to go back to being alone in that room than because I thought he could tell me anything more useful than what I was already doing.

"Sheer," he answered me after a second. "Don't let her rattle you, and don't tell her anything. I know you know how to play dumb, Sunshine, and if there was ever a time for it, it's now."

"She has _evidence_," I hissed back. "She knows I lied to her." It didn't even occur to me until after the words left my mouth that, of course, I had lied to Pat about what happened, too. But he'd known that, and he'd chosen to trust me in spite of it, so I hoped this wouldn't turn him against me.

"So I hear. But I don't think she knows quite what to make of you yet, and that's a good thing. Keep her off balance as long as you can, and maybe—" He cut off sharply, and then added in a rush, "Gotta go now, Sunshine. Keep the faith."

And then I was alone in the room again, even if I was a little warmer than I'd been before.

*********

It was really hard to tell, since the lights glared down the same way all the time, but I thought a couple of days passed after that before I saw or spoke to anyone else. It was probably less, but it _felt_ like a lot more. And I'm not counting the meals that got shoved through a slot in the door from time to time, because as human contact goes, silent and anonymous fingertips aren't especially satisfying.

All I know is, by the time the goddess and her minions came to visit me in my cell, I'd had time to go about six eggs short of a dozen. I'd tried to distract myself with dreaming up new recipes, but it had been really hard to block out the feeling of being a rat snared in a trap.

But on the bright side, if I ever got out and got the chance to actually make it, I was pretty sure that my new Chocolate Whorled Domination was going to be a religious experience.

Anyway, this time one of the minions pulled a chair out for me pointedly as the goddess strode in and sat in the other. It was still just an uncomfortable plastic chair, but somehow she made it look like a throne. I rolled to my feet and took the chair opposite her without fuss, but as I sat down, there was a flash of motion from just over my shoulder and a sharp pain in my arm. I recoiled in startlement, whipping my head around to look, and I saw the guy who'd pulled my chair out drawing back a needle.

"What the carthaginian _hell_?" I choked out, slapping a belated hand protectively over my stinging bicep.

"We have a warrant," the goddess assured me calmly. "You may see it if you'd like." She inclined her head slightly, and one of her minions produced a paper from somewhere and laid it on the table in front of me.

When I actually had to make an _effort_ to drop my chin down to look at the paper, I knew for sure the minion had dosed me with delete. I should have guessed the goddess would try that; you just can't get a good troll through someone's head without delete to paralyze them and keep them still enough for a clear reading. I could still _feel_ my body, but it was starting to harden like a shell all around me. It was like the already claustrophobic feeling of being trapped in a small room was shrinking even maddeningly further. I had to swallow hard to keep down the bile that rose up in my throat.

With monumental effort, I ground out desperately, "Please. You cannn't ddd." I think I was trying to say, "You can't do this to me." But what good I thought that could possibly do, I couldn't tell you. I didn't bother to try to say anything else. You can breathe and swallow and blink on delete, but that's about it. Any words that you try to shape come out unintelligibly garbled, and I didn't see the point in struggling to speak just to end up drooling all over myself.

"All right," the goddess said with vicious cheer. "Let's start from the beginning, shall we? I want you to think about what happened to you at the lake. Think about the vampires who held you captive. Think about Mr. Connor." She stared at me intently, her eyes piercing right through me. Right away, my head started to pound horribly.

No! I howled inside my head. I couldn't let her see that. Maybe she couldn't find Con anyway, but what if she could use my bond with him to reach him, the same way that I could? _I am assailable by you in a way I am assailable to no one and nothing else_, Con had said to me. What the goddess could do with that, I didn't even want to guess. I couldn't let her see what he really was.

Everyone knows that regular humans can't block a mind scan—except for moving around a lot to confuse the person doing the troll. Safely restrained by delete, there should be no way for me to keep her out. But I was making a habit of doing the impossible these days, wasn't I? And maybe I wasn't exactly a regular human. Anyway, I had to try _something_.

I shut my eyes and tuned out my surroundings as much as I could, and sank myself deep inside my own memory. The last time I made cinnamon rolls, I thought to myself, and I caught at that memory like it was a the only life preserver in a heaving ocean. I focused so hard I could smell the salt of the butter and the rich warmth of cinnamon tickling my nose. My hands tingled with the comforting and familiar feel of kneading dough. The heat of the ovens warmed my skin. Any minute Charlie would poke his head around the door, or maybe Mom or Mel.

Distantly, I knew the goddess was still talking to me, but I tried to push myself into that moment in my bakery so hard that I couldn't even tell you what she was saying. I shut her out so thoroughly that I was totally surprised when I felt a hard hand grab my shoulder and give me a fierce shake. My eyes flew open to look straight into the goddess'.

"You can't keep that up all day," she said. "And the longer you try, the more it's going to hurt."

"The more you're going to _make_ it hurt," I wanted to spit at her, but of course I couldn't. I had to content myself with a defiant glare. _Cinnamon rolls_, I thought at her so hard it made my eyes hurt. I'd resisted a kali damned _master vampire's_ will, after all; I wasn't going to let this _bureaucrat_ beat me, no matter how skegging scary she was.

The goddess nodded once, and the minion beside me shook me again.

_Cinnamon rolls_, I insisted inside my head. _Cinnamon rolls, cinnamon rolls, cinnamon rolls_. The way they tasted when they were so hot and fresh they almost dissolved in your mouth. The way the heavy trays dragged against my arms as I hefted them out of the oven. The way flour would cake on my cuticles and under my nails as I worked. The way our regulars would sigh beatifically with that first bite.

The minion beside me shook me and went on shaking me until my teeth rattled. Kind of like that very first batch of cinnamon rolls I ever made, I thought fiercely to myself. They were so hard that your jaw ached from trying to work even a small bite free, and nobody had wanted to risk their teeth on more than a couple of mouthfuls.

It was a long day. By the time I could move my toes again, my head hurt so much I actually thought I might spring an aneurysm in my brain, and I could barely even think the _word_ cinnamon anymore.

But the goddess looked almost as tired as I felt, and also so furious I thought she might actually lunge across the table to throttle me, and that really kind of took the edge off.

She stormed out of my cell with an angry, "We'll continue this later!"

After she'd gone, I sat at the table alone again, wondering how many times I could keep her at bay. Two, maybe? Three? I couldn't imagine that I could keep this up forever.

Exhausted and in pain though I was, I stretched my inner senses out a bit. Maybe I could slip into Nowheresville from here after all. Sure, Con had warned me about the dangers, but what did I have to lose? As I'd expected, though, I brushed up against the cold implacability of heavy, industrial-grade warding almost immediately. This cell had clearly been meant to hold anyone or anything SOF might possibly catch, be it human magic handler, Partblood, or Other.

I'd never wanted to call Con so badly, but I didn't. Every time I felt myself reaching out to stroke so much as a mental finger over our bond, I bit my tongue hard. What was the use of telling him what was happening to me? It would be selfish, and it might make him do something insane.

By the time I finally drifted into an exhausted sleep, my mouth was full of the cloying taste of blood.

*********

It might have been days later when I saw anyone again, but I'd totally lost track of time. For all I knew, it could have been weeks. The pain in my head had tamped down to a dull, bruised sort of ache that left me vaguely nauseated and dizzy. Could a really hard, resisted troll through my head give me a concussion? I had no idea, but it sure as hell felt like it.

This time, when the goddess came into my room, she was smiling. As bad omens go, it was probably the worst I'd ever seen.

"Miss Seddon," she greeted me, with a veneer of politeness. "I've discovered a more...productive method to continue our conversation."

"Don't you mean you've thought up a new kind of torture?" I asked her bitterly. After our last interview, I felt absolutely no urge to sugarcoat the pill with her anymore.

"Not at all," she countered smoothly, not visibly ruffled in the least. "I thought a friendly face might relax you."

And she stepped aside from the door, leaving it open for her minions to hustle someone through it. My heart lurched in my chest and tried to tear itself in two as familiar emerald green eyes met mine. For one golden moment I was just so _happy_ to see him, and the surge of worry and fear for him got all confusingly tangled up with that comfort.

"Miss Seddon," Con said to me, with every appearance of honest surprise, but I could feel in my deeper sense of him that he wasn't surprised at all. "How are you?"

I almost gave a hysterical giggle at that. It sounded like he was making polite tea party chitchat, of all things. And he had that weird not-a-vampire look going on again, but I still had no idea how he managed it. Make a mental note, Sunshine: ask how Con passes, assuming you both survive.

"Oh, fine," I assured him airily, going with it as much as I could. "Dandy, even. But fancy meeting you here."

"Of course I came in for questioning when I heard we were needed for further statement," he said blandly.

"That was very civic-minded of you." I tried to choose my words carefully. "Did they find a working number to reach you at, then?"

"When I came to visit you and found you gone, your landlady told me where you'd been taken. And why. Your family was good enough to inform her." He said this calmly, and didn't so much as look at the goddess of pain beside him, but I could feel an undercurrent there, electric and ferocious. I would have sworn blind at that moment that it was taking all his control not to turn and rip her throat out, but I couldn't have told you how I knew.

But, as irrelevant as it was, my first impulse was to ask him was if he'd _really_ gone to Yolande to ask after me. I just couldn't picture it.

I wrenched my gaze away from Con to shoot a glance at the goddess. She was watching us closely, and I was absolutely sure that was the whole point: she was sure we'd be weaker together than we were apart. I had the horrible suspicion that she was probably right.

When she saw me looking at her, the goddess said simply, "I'll leave you two to get reacquainted before we begin the next round of interviews." With that, she turned on her heel and sailed out of the room, trailing minions in her wake, as always.

Sure we were still being recorded, I looked back at Con and paused to puzzle out what I wanted to ask. "Were you already questioned?"

He shrugged, and it still looked weird to see such a human gesture on him, but I guessed he realized there was probably a vid pickup in the room. "No more than a few cursory questions," he said. "I only arrived at the front desk this evening an hour ago."

Of course it had to be evening outside if Con was here. But what was he planning to do when the sun came up? Sure, we were okay in a windowless room for now, but what if they kept him somewhere else? What if the goddess questioned him in her windowed office again, only out of my reach this time? I couldn't think about Con going up in flames; my poor battered brain just refused to go there.

I couldn't say any of those things aloud, and I didn't think for one moment that he hadn't considered all that and decided to come anyway. I wasn't sure whether I wanted more to kiss him, or smack him in frustrated anxiousness. So really, I guess it wasn't all that different from every other time I'd seen him.

I thought about it for a second, and decided to ask him what I really wanted most to know anyway. Let him figure out how to answer me in code if he had to. "What the carthaginian hell are you _doing_ here?" I demanded.

His eyes glinted, but he just said, "As I said, I heard I was needed." Not _we_ were needed this time, but _I_. "Had someone called me, I would have come sooner," he added, and I could hear the slight reproach underneath the words.

I couldn't very well retort, "Ask a vampire to rescue me from SOF regional HQ? Are you _crazy_?" The closest I could come was, "The interrogation isn't very pleasant this time around, and I'm sorry you're here for it." It felt awkward and stilted and wasn't nearly as satisfying to say, but I went with it anyway.

"I'm sure they won't hold us too long," he said, with what would probably sound like optimistic comfort to someone who didn't know him well enough to hear the solemn promise hidden there.

"I hope not," I sighed, wishing I could really trust that he could bust us out somehow. "My apprentice Paulie isn't ready to take over the bakery on his own yet." And to think, I'd always hated fairytales where Prince Charming rescues the damsel in distress. To be fair, I'd rescued Con from distress a time or two myself, so I figured maybe it was okay to want to be rescued this time around.

"You should not trouble yourself. I am certain it will not come to that."

"_I'm_ not," I countered perversely. I mean, here he was, a vampire willingly trapped by piles of wards and hordes of SOF, just waiting for the sun to rise or some bright officer to rumble his cover and stake him, and _I_ was the only one freaking out? "You could be a little more troubled yourself, you know."

Con regarded me seriously, and shrugged again. I wasn't sure if his calm was comforting, or actually freaking me out even more. Surely he had a plan, right? He couldn't have just geared off here without a plan.

Except, oh shit, did he know the goddess of pain had a warrant to troll our heads? Could vampires even _be_ scanned, and what would it tell her if he couldn't? "Con...nor," I remembered just in time. "You should know: Depex Jain has a warrant to scan us. It's not a...er..._comfortable_ process. If you understand 'not comfortable' to mean 'searing, crushing agony', that is."

He paused thoughtfully, and I could actually feel him trying to find a way to phrase what he wanted to say. "Oh, carthaginian hell," he finally said, in the same very distinct and careful manner of a tourist repeating something from a phrasebook.

I felt my eyes go wide, and I had to hastily smother a surprised laugh in my throat. I was absolutely certain he'd never said those words before. Right away I felt better, and I knew by the faint satisfaction in his eyes when he saw me biting back a grin that that had been the whole point. At that moment, I was definitely feeling more like kissing him than smacking him, even if he _was_ a reckless idiot for coming.

"But I'm sure she hopes to use it as a tool to aid our obscured recall, and to learn what befell us," Con went on more delicately after a moment.

Answering the question he carefully wasn't asking, I told him, "So far, all she's managed to pull out of my memory is the secret to my cinnamon rolls. I'm not sure that's exactly what she had in mind."

"Likely not," he agreed mildly, and his eyes glinted at me again.

We looked at each other for a long moment, and suddenly I couldn't stand it that he was all the way across the room anymore. I stumbled to my feet and started toward him; he met he halfway, reaching out to close his arms around me as soon as I came in reach. He tucked me neatly against him, and I buried my face in his chest, feeling tears thickening the back of my throat. Even so close, I still didn't dare breathe a word of all the things I really wanted to say to him. Who knew how sharp the bugs in here were? There's some that can hear an ant walking across the floor at fifty paces.

"It's good to see you," I mumbled into his chest at last, because it really, really _was_, in spite of everything. "I'm glad you came, but I wish you weren't here."

One of his hands stroked gently through my hair, and I thought I felt the faint press of his lips against the top of my head. "I'm glad to see you, also," was all he said.

"I hate to interrupt a touching moment," came Pat's tinny voice from the speaker overhead, "but you need to get moving _now_, Connor. I don't know how long Aimil and Jesse can keep the goddess busy. We've got sound and vid on a loop for the next five minutes."

I reeled back in Con's arms. "_What_?" I demanded.

"Perhaps we should discuss that later, Sunshine," Con said as calmly as he said most things, and casually lifted his hand from my hair to set his fingernails against the flesh beneath his collarbone. Before I could even gasp, he gouged shallowly into his own flesh and pulled out something that had lain beneath it. It was small and flat and covered in Con's blood.

You know, I was really getting tired of everything in my life involving blood lately. It was a very bad habit I was getting into. But I guess these things happen when you start hanging out with vampires, right? Damn.

"To smuggle it past the security search," Con explained simply. And without another word, he strode over to the door and slid the object into the key code slot beside the door. There was a faint _bleep_, and the door swung obediently open, right along with my jaw.

Con turned to look back at me and held out his hand. "Come then," he said, just as he had—was it days or weeks?—before.

Where could we go now? What could we do? Was there any way to salvage something of my quiet life of cinnamon rolls and family? There wasn't time to ask, not now, but as I looked at him, I couldn't shake the feeling that, between us, we'd make things right somehow.

So once again I took his hand and went with him into the night.


End file.
